Revision as of 22:24, 30 September 2012

Bumblebee is an effort to make NVIDIA Optimus enabled laptops work in GNU/Linux systems. Such feature involves two graphics cards with two different power consumption profiles plugged in a layered way sharing a single framebuffer.

Bumblebee: Optimus for Linux

Optimus Technology is an hybrid graphics implementation without a hardware multiplexer. The integrated GPU manages the display while the dedicated GPU manages the most demanding rendering and ships the work to the integrated GPU to be displayed. When the laptop is running on battery supply, the dedicated GPU is turned off to save power and prolong the battery life.

Bumblebee is a software implementation based on VirtualGL and a kernel driver to be able to use the dedicated GPU, which is not physically connected to the screen.

Bumblebee tries to mimic the Optimus technology behavior; using the dedicated GPU for rendering when needed and power it down when not in use. The present releases only support rendering on-demand, power-management is a work in progress.

The NVIDIA dedicated card is managed as a separate X server connected to a "fake" screen (the screen is configured but not used). The second server is called using VirtualGL as if it were a remote server. That said, you will need a series of steps to set-up the kernel driver, the X server and a daemon.

Warning: Bumblebee is still under heavy development! But your help is very welcome.

Installation

Before installing Bumblebee check your BIOS and activate Optimus (shareable graphics), if possible (BIOS doesn't have to provide this option), and install the intel driver for the secondary on board graphics card.

Note: If you want to run a 32-bit application on a 64-bit system you must install lib32-virtualglAUR and proper lib32-* libraries.

Finished - reboot system and use the shell program optirun for Optimus NVIDIA rendering!

Usage

The command line programm optirun shipped with bumblebee is your best friend for running applications on your Optimus NVIDIA card.

Test Bumblebee if it works with your Optimus system:

$ optirun glxgears

If it succeeds and the terminal you are running from mentions something about your NVIDIA - Optimus with Bumblebee is working!

General Usage:

$ optirun [options] <application> [application-parameters]

Some Examples:

Start Firefox accelerated with Optimus:

$ optirun firefox

Start Windows applications with Optimus:

$ optirun wine <windows application>.exe

Use NVIDIA Settings with Optimus:

$ optirun nvidia-settings -c :8

For a list of options for optirun run:

$ optirun --help

Configuration

You can configure the behaviour of Bumblebee to fit your needs. Fine tuning like speed optimization, power managment and other stuff can be configured in /etc/bumblebee/bumblebee.conf

Optimizing Speed

Bumblebee renders frames for your Optimus NVIDIA card in an invisible X Server with VirtualGL and transports them back to your visible X Server.

Frames will be compressed before they are transported - this saves bandwith and can be used for speedup optimization of bumblebee:

To use an other compression method for a single application:

$ optirun -c <compress-method> application

The method of compres will affect performance in the GPU/GPU usage. Compressed methods (such as jpeg) will load the CPU the most but will load GPU the minimum necessary; uncompressed methods loads the most on GPU and the CPU will have the minimum load possible.

Compressed Methods are: jpeg, rgb, yuv

Uncompressed Methods are: proxy, xv

To use a standard compression for all applications set the VGLTransport to <compress-method> in /etc/bumblebee/bumblebee.conf

/etc/bumblebee/bumblebee.conf

...
[optirun]
VGLTransport=proxy
...

You can also play with the way VirtualGL reads back the pixels from your graphic card. Setting VGL_READBACK environment variable to pbo should increase the performance. Compare these two:

Enable NVIDIA card during shutdown

The NVIDIA card may not correctly initialize during boot if the card was powered off when the system was last shutdown. One option is to set TurnCardOffAtExit=false in /etc/bumblebee/bumblebee.conf, however this will enable the card everytime you stop the Bumblebee daemon, even if done manually. To ensure that the NVIDIA card is always powered on during shutdown, add the following hook function (if using bbswitchAUR):

Multiple monitors

Note: This configuration is only valid for laptops, where the extra output is hardwired to the intel card. Unfortunately this is not the case for some (or most?) laptops, where, lets say, the HDMI output is hardwired to the NVIDIA card. In that case there is no such an ideal solution, as shown here. But you can make your extra output at least usable with the instructions on the bumblebee wiki page.

You can set up multiple monitors with xorg.conf. Set them to use the Intel card, but Bumblebee can still use the NVIDIA card. One example configuration is below for two identical screens with 1080p resolution and using the HDMI out.

CUDA Without Bumblebee

This is not well documented, but you do not need Bumblebee to use CUDA and it may work even on machines where optirun fails. For a guide on how to get it working with the Lenovo IdeaPad Y580 (which uses the GeForce 660M), see: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Lenovo_IdeaPad_Y580#NVIDIA_Card. Those instructions are very likely to work with other machines (except for the acpi-handle-hack part, which may not be necessary).

Fatal IO error 11 (Resource temporarily unavailable) on X server

Change KeepUnusedXServer in /etc/bumblebee/bumblebee.conf from false to true. Your program forks into background and bumblebee don't know anything about it.

Video tearing

Video tearing is a somewhat common problem on Bumblebee. To fix it, you need to enable vsync. It should be enabled by default on the Intel card, but verify that from Xorg logs. To check whether or not it is enabled for nvidia, run

$ optirun nvidia-settings -c :8

X Server XVideo Settings -> Sync to VBlank and OpenGL Settings -> Sync to VBlank should both be enabled. The Intel card has in general less tearing, so use it for video playback. Especially use VA-API for video decoding (e.g. mplayer-vaapi and with -vsync parameter).